Women are the stars in this book on astronomy

Sunday

Ask people to name famous astronomers, and the first names that come to mind probably will include Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler and, from the modern era, Carl Sagan.

Those answers wouldn’t satisfy Mabel Armstrong, who lives in Harrisburg and taught chemistry at Lane Community College for 27 years.

No, Armstrong wants the world and especially young women who might shy away from astronomy as a career because of its supposed male domination to know about all the women who have made tremendous contributions to the science of astronomy. To tell their stories, Armstrong has written a book, “Women Astronomers: Reaching for the Stars,” published in 2008 by Stone Pine Press Inc., in Marcola.

Armstrong begins her list with a Babylonian princess, named Chief Astronomer Priestess of the Moon Goddess of the City by her father, King Sargon, more than 4,300 years ago. No one knows her real name, Armstrong says, but the priestesses who worked under her, creating calendars based on movement of the stars, called her EnHeduanna, meaning “ornament of heaven.”

It goes on fascinatingly from there, with 20 more biographies of the most accomplished women astronomers, plus 15 snapshots of up-and-coming women now working in astronomy.

Hypatia, a Greek woman who lived in Alexandria, Egypt, in the fourth century, worked at the fabled library at Alexandria, taught mathematics, physics and astronomy, wrote many textbooks, invented a means for sailors to distill fresh water from sea water and designed an astrolabe for navigating by the stars. Eventually, she was murdered for her liberal beliefs and her nontraditional activities.

In the seventh century, Korean Queen Sonduk predicted solar and lunar eclipses, calculated the equinoxes and built the oldest astronomical observatory still in existence, the Chonsongdae Observatory.

In the dark ages of 12th century Germany, a wealthy child called Hildegard of Bingen grew up in a Benedictine convent because of her ill health probably migraines or epilepsy which gave her plenty of time to study medicine, botany, music, philosophy, theology, languages and “cosmology,” the study of the universe.

Three hundred years before Copernicus, she concluded that the Earth revolved around the sun.

Another German woman, Caroline Herschel became an expert telescope builder and also cataloged 2,600 nebulae, on her way to becoming the foremost woman astronomer in Europe at that time. She died in 1848, in her 98th year.

Williamina “Mina” Fleming (1857-1911) started out as a maid to astronomer Edward Pickering of Harvard Observatory, who told his male assistant, “My Scottish maid could do a better job than you’re doing.”

She did, becoming the first of Harvard’s “women computers” people who did scientific computations in the precomputer days and the first woman astrophysicist.

After enduring the scorn of professors and students of physics at England’s Cambridge University, Cecilia Payne eventually found her way to the United States, where she believed women would be better accepted in academia.

She discovered that stars consist almost entirely of hydrogen, and earned the first Ph.D. ever granted in astronomy in 1925 at Harvard University.

She taught astronomy classes, headed the department and supervised graduate students but enjoyed neither the status nor the salary of her male colleagues, including her husband, a Russian astronomer and political refugee, Sergei Gaposchkin.

Five-year-old Helen Sawyer saw Halley’s comet in 1910 and lived to see its next appearance in 1986. In between, she earned a doctorate in astronomy from Rad-cliffe College, married fellow astronomer Frank Hogg and wrote a weekly newspaper column on astronomy for 30 years.

Known after her marriage as Helen Hogg, she also wrote a book on star-watching, “The Stars Belong to Everyone,” and three editions of “Catalogues of Variable Stars in Globular Clusters,” on which she was considered an international authority as well as the discoverer of hundreds of new variable stars.

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